> what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuf

> what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't. People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limits or can people just flag until you arbitrarily take that ability away, where is the accountability? How is taking away the ability of others to speak altogether better than the possibility of some cussing or other things that are harmful to good faith communication? It may be harder for people to remain civil around lethally serious subjects, but it's not impossible -- and it's not fair to punish everybody, to let random people punish everybody, because you predict what would happen otherwise. It's like a stone that keeps tigers away, on steroids even: > If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself. Any other way? That "way" is still a black box. So this is a super tight rope, and left and right is utter destruction? What does "destroy itself" mean, that the server would vanish? Or that it would "bleed" from one topic into another, and suddenly people are also more irate about wiggly lines? And of course, if you actually believe that claim, then you can't even make any changes, you can't try it out, because then HN would destroy itself. How perfectly circular. How do you know the opposite isn't true, that if things are arbitrarily suppressed, it leads to a bad atmosphere and grudges, and people get tempted to bring up a topic when it's not actually the topic?